Feed Your Children Well

Some years ago, when I was living in Dallas, a Latin American immigrant woman found herself in a world of trouble when she had a photo her husband had taken of their young toddler nursing at her breast developed at a drugstore. The photo developer thought she was looking at child pornography, and called the cops. The poor woman and her family were dragged through the criminal justice system, before finally being cleared — all because they come from a culture that sees breastfeeding as normal, and tolerates doing it longer than many, perhaps most, Americans would.

And now Pope Francis has encouraged mothers to feed their children at Mass. (Which, somehow, his critics will hold against him because, well, he was speaking.)

This seems definitive but it is also counter-cultural. If the Catholic teaching isn’t enough reason to breastfeed for as long as is good for the child, there’s another reason, and one that explains why even those of us for whom it’s no longer a practical matter might find ourselves lactivists. That is, that the alternative is a prime and paradigmatic example of a deeply human practice being technologized and commodified and these we should resist. Starting in the 1950s, many natural human activities were treated as primitive and replaced with un-natural substitutes, because money could be made that way. Even doctors, who are far more malleable creatures of their society and economy than we’d like to think, colluded.

He goes on to say how Experts™ of the era told women that formula was better for their babies than mother’s milk. My mom remembers telling her doctor before she went into labor with either me or my sister that she wanted to breastfeed, but the hospital gave her the shot anyway to dry up her milk — this, while she was in recovery from childbirth anesthesia (they used to knock a birthgiving mother out in those days). I also often wondered as a child why my mom was so skittish about food from the garden, preferring canned and pre-packaged foods — until as an adult, I ran across advertisement from the 1950s that presented industrialized food as safer and more hygienic than what you could grow in the garden. They literally frightened many people into turning on commonsense food traditions.

So it has been with breastfeeding. My wife breastfed all three of our kids. Oddly enough, it was easier to do that in heathenous New York City than in God-fearing Dallas. More than a few Texans reacted as if it were barbarous, and regarded the possibility that they might catch a glimpse of a mother’s exposed breast, even with the nipple safely tucked away in the mouth of a nursing baby, as an act of public eroticism.

I especially appreciate that the Pope told Catholics that they should not be afraid to breastfeed even at mass. That will go a long way, I think, towards de-eroticizing breastfeeding in the imaginations of many, and in turn remove the moralistic stigma against doing what women have done for their babies for all of human history. I’m not saying that breastfeeding mothers need not be sensitive to the culture around them. I am saying that a culture that stigmatizes breastfeeding in public ought to reconsider whether it is morally right to do so.

Breastfeeding is one of the marks of a crunchy conservative, I wrote in my 2006 book Crunchy Cons.Many conservatives think it is a sort of hippie, countercultural thing to do — but as David says, that is no reason not to do it:

If we begin not with what we think we can do but with what the Church asks of us, we find an alternative lifestyle pretty much required. That, I think, just looking at my family’s own fumbling and inconsistent attempt to live a Catholic life, will bring blessings you don’t expect, as well as sacrifices. Those blessings might begin with a mother feeding her child.

This is how I started down my own crunchy-con path, out of mainstream conservatism and into something more traditional. Without knowing exactly what we were doing, my wife and I, both religious and political conservatives, began to place what the Church asked of us first, even if it put us outside the mainstream of our own culture and political tribe. We did this not in spite of being conservative, but because of the kinds of conservatives that we were.

It’s sort of funny how Rod Dreher’s usual crowd of ‘Progressives’ are so gung-ho about breasteses and their good and wholesome product, are also the ones down with two dudes getting ‘married’ and buying a newborn from Ukraine or wherever. I guess they can afford a wetnurse too.

“In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in most places you rarely saw women breastfeeding. It just wasn’t done.”

Sure it was. Those were the years of the Whole Earth Catalogue (remember that fine publication?), homemade bread, homemade yogurt, bean sprouts, Diet for a Small Planet, Small is Beautiful and everything else homemade, home-grown and natural. I breastfed my daughter for two years in the seventies, and I even did it in church — along with several friends. No questions asked. Now said daughter is a mother herself, and it’s all schedules and privacy. Makes me chuckle. Give me the good old days.

for all the insane sexualizing of the culture people are still uncomfortable with real human bodies and I think that is part of the problem re: public breast feeding. I am not so sure we are comfortable with all sorts of normal body functions and in part I suspect this is because we have been so removed from agricultural past everything is sanitized and if not – then it is icky.

I think it absurd a woman should have to hide under a sheet – between the baby and one’s clothes there is little to be seen and even if there is – get over it. This is how God created us.

I can’t reiterate enough how far the pendulum has swung. I have a 6 month old and 5 year old. Just in those 5 years, the multi-times a day visit from “lactation consultants” reinforces this (we had those visits 5 years ago as well).

Now, in addition to all the visits from “consultants” and their leading questions and judgmental tone, the hospital refuses to give out pacifiers, the idea being the kid won’t get attached to it and prefer the nipple. To the point that the nurses put a note on the bassinet in the room saying the parents provided the pacifier and not to throw it away. We did find out boys are exempt if they’re being circumcised as our son came back with one.

Oh, and they’ve eliminated the nursery and the kid stays in the room the entire time ensuring no one gets any sleep.

It was all I could do not to snap at a few of them, but my wife planned on breastfeeding anywa and I figured she didn’t need me arguing with these “consultants”, who’s advice we already knew from the first time around and if not could have found on web-md.

My wife doesn’t produce enough, for whatever reason, so we supplement with formula. Our pediatrician gave a knowing smirk and reassured us there was nothing wrong with this when we answered she was breastfeeding and supplementing – not because we thought there was, but I inferred he deals with a lot of parents who are scared to death of formula because of all this hysteria as he explained there is no issue.

I wouldn’t say the Pope is doing some big thing here, more like he’s reinforcing the current current culture like he has on so many other issues (environment, immigration, divorce, etc.)

I hear you, and I can police my own attention during Mass and so can many others. I’m thinking of teens, etc. It’s one thing to realize that breastfeeding is a natural and good part of life; it’s quite another to allow it to impact the quality of community worship. Everything has its proper time and place. I respectfully disagree with you.

Oops, I see Carlo made the point before me. I gotta admit, sometimes I just skim the comments.

Anyhoo, Let’s Go Cub’s snark just doesn’t get it. You guys try to hold two contradictory things as good at the same time. Mass immigration is good, open space preservation is good. Gay’s adopting newborns is good, breast feeding is good, und so weiter.

Bernie, I successfully nursed my oldest during Mass, using a cover. I doubt anyone even noticed. It would have been a lot more noticeable if I’d had to climb over several people and carry out a screaming infant (well, I know it was, because she was also colicky and sometimes I had to do that–the Sundays when she just nursed to sleep peacefully were much better!). The only reason I couldn’t nurse the other two during Mass was because I was usually already out in the vestibule (or, horrors, the cry room) with one or the other of the toddlers; toddlers are far more disruptive at Mass than any nursing baby could ever be.

My take on this is simple: it is appropriate to nurse anywhere where it is appropriate to feed a baby with a bottle–that is, anywhere where it is appropriate to bring a baby in the first place. I think most of the “breastfeeding fights” come not from people who are really offended at the idea that a mother is feeding her baby the way nature intended, but from people who think that children under age 2 (and their mothers) don’t belong in public places. Take the debates about breastfeeding on an airplane–most people don’t seriously believe an infant should go hours without food. What they really mean is: it inconveniences me if you bring an infant aboard an airplane, so don’t do it.

Lots of people who get mad about mothers trying to nurse during Mass are really just mad that the baby is there. I’ve been told by older Catholics that in their day Mom stayed home with the baby until the baby was old enough to sit still and behave in church. They don’t seem to realize that, while the care of young children can indeed dispense a mother from Mass, it’s not particularly spiritually healthy for her to skip Mass for all the years she has small children–and it’s not always possible or good for the family to do perpetual split Masses either.

And the same is true for people who get mad that a mom is nursing in a restaurant, coffee shop, mall or other business. It’s not so much that she dares (gasp!) to feed her baby with her own milk from her own breast as it is that she dares to go out in public with the baby in the first place.

Now: I’m all in favor of churches, businesses etc. creating private spaces for moms in which to nurse. Many women actually prefer such accommodations, especially when they’re still learning how to breastfeed or when the baby is cranky or teething etc. But I’m not in favor of the attitude that there is something so private and personal and quasi-erotic about nursing that nursing moms must hide themselves away lest anybody be offended. The baby is just eating. There’s nothing particularly private about that; most of us don’t go into a closet or (heaven forbid) a public bathroom to eat a meal.

And while I preferred to use a cover when nursing in public, I know some moms whose babies absolutely refuse to nurse under those conditions. And the more mom tries to nurse and gets stressed the more the baby refuses and starts howling with unsatisfied hunger. It’s a no-win; better for her to nurse without a cover than for the baby to be hungry.

I did purchase one of these as a gift for one of my sisters (whose babies did not like to be covered). They are adorable and seem to work well! 🙂

If a “teen” finds himself “distracted” by a sliver of my fish belly white multiparous mammary apparatus during Mass, he can bury his nose in the missal. It builds character. As it is, it seems to me the only people who ever find themselves so “distracted” are old lady scolds who are concerned that “the men” must be offended. That has definitely been my experience in the field.

Growing up, my mom breastfed us and supplemented with formula if needed. So did practically every other woman, and this was back in the 80s. I don’t know if it was a regional thing or what, but what I remember picking up was that supplementing with formula was fine and dandy if you couldn’t produce or couldn’t produce enough. If you did so without any health related excuse, it was kind of presumed you did it just because you were vain and didn’t want them to sag (which I later found out was an old wives tale).

I say one should if at all possible, but I would caution anyone about tongue clucking if the formula comes out because nothing gets egg on one’s face worse than when you assume the worst when in fact there is a perfectly legitimate reason for the behavior. Same with not having 5 or 6 or 7 kids in some Catholic circles. It is the height of presumption to just assume that because someone doesn’t have a gaggle of kids its simply because they are sinning.

It’s sort of funny how Rod Dreher’s usual crowd of ‘Progressives’ are so gung-ho about breasteses and their good and wholesome product, are also the ones down with two dudes getting ‘married’ and buying a newborn from Ukraine or wherever.

I for once, prefer that the gay couple be black. How will we get to celebrate white genocide otherwise?

“Oh, and they’ve eliminated the nursery and the kid stays in the room the entire time ensuring no one gets any sleep.”

Oh brother. They tried this on me several times, even back in the day (all my children were born between 93 and 04). There is a fairly effective solution, though. Just tell them you are so exhausted that you do not feel safe caring for the baby.

I pulled that one a few times myself, and it always worked. Even for a nursery that was “closed,” they managed to dig a caregiver out of the woodwork to come and keep an eye on the baby. God knows the hospital doesn’t want the bad publicity of a lawsuit due to Mom dropping baby on its head trying to care for it while too tired to hold her own eyes open–all because the hospital refused to provide care for baby.

The 12-year-old in me can’t resist the urge to invoke one of Rod’s favorite spoiled Millennial put-downs: Titty-Baby.

More seriously, my wife nursed our kid, but it wasn’t easy. She once went to a La Leche-type meeting. She got some helpful advice, but also saw her limits with it. One kid walked up to his mother, pulled her breast out of her bra, and began feeding with no assistance whatsoever.

The worm hasn’t turned everywhere. My county has a 20% breastfeeding rate. When I delivered my 9’10” fourth baby last year at the county hospital, she was placed on a protocol monitoring blood sugars and had to be supplemented with formula to prevent hypoglycemia. All standard and very good. But when the attending pediatrician wrote orders that she was to be supplemented with formula every three hours for 24 hours regardless of how low her sugars got, I objected and asked for more flexible supplementation taking into account the fact that I wanted to breastfeed. I then got a lecture from my 50 something nurse about how we have to look out for the baby’s interests first, etc. I was also sent home with formula samples (a bad idea). There is no lactation consultant at the hospital and no follow up support available whatsoever for women who are having difficulty with breastfeeding.

I sympathize with families like Sam M’s where bfing is almost impossible due to underlying medical circumstances, but if my county had more cultural pressure coming from prenatal caregivers, hospital staff, and families, we would have much higher bfing rates. This is important because despite the generally low quality of studies comparing breastfeeding to formula feeding, the available evidence is that breast milk is still superior nutrition for infants.

I always prefer to nurse in the confessional while at mass. It dispenses me from addressing the needs of older children still sitting in the pews (my husband runs interference), and also allows me to spread out and get the baby in a comfortable position- not always possible if you are sitting next to other people in the pews. Plus, if you come armed with the diaper bag, you can burp the baby afterward and deal with the egress of bodily fluids from either end of the infant in the privacy of the confessional.

I’m concerned about the people who state that 9 month old babies were losing weight because they were being encouraged to breast feed – exclusively (?!). At 9 months, all but one of my kids were still nursing, but they were also eating with the rest of the family. This was between 1987 and 2001… and I had monster babies (all but one over 9 lbs). They did fine on breast milk alone for 4-5 months, and they kept nursing for a couple of years (I let them decide when to wean). But they surely would have suffered if they had not had other nourishment as well, including other liquids from a cup starting at about 9 months.

“Oh, and they’ve eliminated the nursery and the kid stays in the room the entire time ensuring no one gets any sleep.”

Well, nurses are medical professionals, not highly paid babysitters. The postpartum period is a time for bonding with the infant, not spending the time watching tube and allocating all diaper changes and feelings to the nurses. The reason the rules changed is that some families WOULD, given the chance, hardly have the infant in the room at all.

With that said,with all of my babies, as soon as the 24 hour time was up and the kid had their PKU testing done, I was out of there like a bat out of hell. Hospitals are nasty places with little sleep, lots of bad bacteria, and nasty food, along with the most uncomfortable beds known to man.

M_Young, the question I was responding to was why Red-Staters would be more hostile to public breastfeeding than New Yorkers. I think the answer is fairly obvious: because the Red States have a higher proportion of social conservatives, who are also, disproportionately, sexual prudes, not to mention nostalgists for the glory days of the 1950s, when women and black folks knew their place and babies were grateful for their bottled formula, gol’ durn it.

Liberals’ position is: if a mother wants to breastfeed her kid, it’s none of their business, and certainly not another in the long parade of our culture’s many moral failings against which we must be ever vigilant. Since that position is consistent with literally any position one might take toward gay marriage, it’s not at all clear what you and Carlo mean to say here, other than that you’re hopelessly obsessed with gay marriage and will bring it up anytime you can. But we knew that already.

While I’m all for breastfeeding, when possible, and my wife breastfed our children, I think we also need to make room for ethnical/cultural sensitivities about it. If Texans are sensitive to public breastfeeding, a thin cloth and some discretion is not a bad thing.

Oh come on, if we wanted to celebrate white genocide, we would pass laws decreeing that all white people are gay, and may only marry same sex partners, also specifying that all non-white people are heterosexual, and may not marry same sex partners.

This might lead to extensive litigation in which light-skinneded people who are attracted to the opposite sex assert that this proves they are non-white, while darker people who are attracted to their own sex sue to be declared white.

Let’s Go Cubs: It is obvious that many of the lefty posters here think that breast feeding is good in its own right, beyond the jollies they get from they (or their partner) pulling out a teat and shocking the Red State rubes. But obviously that positive good is denied to infants adopted by homosexual male couples because, you see, there really is a difference between men and women.

I am not a lactation expert, and I have never adopted a baby, but doesn’t this also attach to traditional opposite-sex couples who adopt? Not all women lactate. It’s usually associated with, you know, delivering a baby.

I do understand that you can sometimes “induce” lactation in an adoptive mother, but I am not sure how well it works, and I think it’s pretty rare.

The current recommendation is to breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, then start solids. The AAP recommends breastfeeding until at least one, and further depending on mutual desire to continue. Of course, if you have a baby who is failing to thrive, you are going to watch that kid closely and counsel the family about nutrition accordingly. It’s really important to have breastfeeding support out of the hospital, or else you are going to have a lot of new mothers returning at one week and saying they wanted to breastfeed but “didn’t produce enough milk” when what really happened is the baby was latching incorrectly, the formula samples were ready at hand, and the grandmother was pressuring the mother to stop nursing the baby because if it didn’t sleep peacefully for three hours at a time it clearly “wasn’t getting enough”. This is the kind of thing we are up against in my neck of the woods, so it makes me smile to hear that hospitals are being so proactive about breastfeeding elsewhere, even if some people feel like their toes are getting stepped on.

Well, nurses are medical professionals, not highly paid babysitters. The postpartum period is a time for bonding with the infant, not spending the time watching tube and allocating all diaper changes and feelings to the nurses.

What a nasty, judgmental assumption! Maybe women are exhausted from giving birth and want to rest and recover while they can, since no one will be available to offer respite once they go home in 2-4 days.

M_Young, first, you can call me LGC for short. Second, there are wet nurses — which, I’ll grant you, smacks of surrogacy, but would be hard for conservatives to object to, I would think, given the millennia of history behind the practice.

Third, I think maybe we have yet another example here of people confusing liberals with progressives. You’re talking about the latter; but the basic liberal attitude is to live and let live wherever possible. My sister and I were bottle-fed, and it didn’t do either of us any harm, as far as I can tell (unless it somehow conduces to liberal politics? I wonder if that’s been studied). So I just don’t care which way a given family goes on this; you might say that like any good liberal, I believe in a woman’s right to choose.

But, as I undestand it, the very concept of White Genocide is that its not about physical, but cultural destruction! What’ more genocidal in that regard than a White baby raised by a Black gay couple, in a country with a large non-white minority?

It’s based on direct experience. People tend to assume that because they will only use the nursing staff as babysitters occasionally and respectfully, others will do the same. It’s not true.

“Maybe women are exhausted from giving birth…”

Yes, going through childbirth and caring for a newborn is exhausting. I’ve done it four times. But mothers whose peripartum course does not preclude caring for a newborn…should care for a newborn. When there’s been a straightforward delivery women should assume care of their infants while in the hospital. Believe me, nurses these days have other things they have to do.

You’re right, they aren’t baby sitters and are in fact medical professionals. I was using it as an example of the militancy on display in hospitals. With our first one, she was with us 90% of the time and the nursery was available and expected to do the same anyway, so we weren’t affected.

Funny how you cite their medical experience but when the pros tell you to supplement and give you free formula, you know better than the professionals.

M_Young, the question I was responding to was why Red-Staters would be more hostile to public breastfeeding than New Yorkers. I think the answer is fairly obvious: because the Red States have a higher proportion of social conservatives, who are also, disproportionately, sexual prudes, not to mention nostalgists for the glory days of the 1950s, when women and black folks knew their place and babies were grateful for their bottled formula, gol’ durn it.

Liberals’ position is: if a mother wants to breastfeed her kid, it’s none of their business, and certainly not another in the long parade of our culture’s many moral failings against which we must be ever vigilant.

EC, you don’t have any clue what you’re talking about. Breastfeeding prejudices, both pro- and anti-, don’t fit into a neat box like you think – not anywhere close. You can find La Leche League zealots (we used to call them nursing Nazis when our first couple of kids were little and my wife was struggling to nurse them – it ain’t easy for everyone, as many posters have mentioned here) who are practically socialists and some who are to the right of G. Gordon Liddy. And the same is true for those who have an aversion to nursing and/or an aversion to nursing in public.

I have no advice of my own on whether breastfeeding should be done in public. I just find the ideology people wrap around the issue amusing.

While its true that some of the concern people express eventually comes around to teenage boys being distracted, I think the truth is I think its only a little part of it. People are uncomfortable with people dealing with any bodily matters in public, whether they be sexual or not. If I was scratching a rash next to another person, chances are that they’d find it gross. Some people find lactation gross.

Knowing just the history of fashion, its also hard to think of a time when breasts weren’t treated as erotic. Medieval women wore dresses that minimized their breasts, and from the Renaissance onward, upper class women often wore dresses that emphasized a her décolletage. Women in the upper class also didn’t breastfeed, they handed over their babies to wet nurses. Corsets later introduced emphasized the same fashion choices.

Btw, in Ancient Greek art, if you want to take it back that far, while men were shown naked, women — including goddesses — were more often were shown draped in a toga. The one goddess who would not be draped was Aphrodite, which includes statues where she’s only draped below her torso, and is shown guarding her breasts.

On those two things in particular, not much has changed over the centuries. What has changed are other things in our culture.

I am a family medicine physician with experience doing FP obstetrics, so I’m quite familiar with how protocols dealing with large for gestational age infants can be changed to accommodate breastfeeding mothers.

“. . . the alternative is a prime and paradigmatic example of a deeply human practice being technologized and commodified and these we should resist. Starting in the 1950s, many natural human activities were treated as primitive and replaced with un-natural substitutes, because money could be made that way. Even doctors, who are far more malleable creatures of their society and economy than we’d like to think, colluded.”

This is a little bit of an oversimplification. Formula was originally invented not as a replacement for breastfeeding, but as an alternative for mothers who were already not breastfeeding but who were giving their infants cow’s milk – a dangerous practice that was harming their children.

And “nature” isn’t quite as benign as this rosy picture of breastfeeding might suggest. My family and I visited a farm recently where a goat had given birth to triplets – a rarity, apparently, in the goat world. The mother was rejecting the runt of the litter, refusing to allow it to feed. So guess what the farmers did? They gave the baby goat formula!

If “nature” had been allowed to take its course, that goat would have died. So would (and have) many children whose mothers were unable to breastfeed them and who did not have access to alternatives such as formula. Underproduction of milk has been an issue for many mothers for many centuries, and humans have come up with countless ways of dealing with it, from the use of nursemaids and wet nurses in Western and Asian societies to the practice of communal nursing in some African and South American cultures. Formula is now another way of dealing with that problem.

Yes, the formula industry is an industry, and it wants to make money like any good industry. It hit a nadir when it convinced doctors and mothers that formula was superior to breastmilk, particularly at a time in American culture when doctors practiced a kind of benevolent paternalism especially towards their female patients. But given that we in America don’t practice wet-nursing or communal nursing, formula provides an ESSENTIAL function for many mothers – including myself.

It seems like a truly “traditional” attitude towards feeding our children would be simply a pragmatic one: you do what you have to do to make sure they are healthy. Now we have the very non-traditional luxury of making it moralistic, such that we feel free to imply that a mother isn’t “Catholic enough” if she isn’t breastfeeding. This also has to do with our historical moment: somehow American culture’s obsession with psychological theories about the mother-child bond (itself a product of the 1970s, around the same time that “crunchy” folk started rejecting the “commodotized” world of the 1950s) got tied up with the physical act of breastfeeding. Add a religious layer to that, and now the breastfeeding mom (especially one who endures through all difficulties) can be painted as a martyr for her children, while the formula feeding one just wasn’t willing to suffer enough.

It seems to me, though, that Christian charity would demand that we assume not laziness, or vanity, or ignorance on the part of formula-feeding mothers. (After all, are women who breast-feed in part because it’s cheaper than formula or because it helps them lose weight selfish and vain?) Shouldn’t we, in Christian charity, first assume that all mothers are trying to do their best for their families?

“Jim the First, see my previous reply to M_Young. You have confused liberalism with progressivism. It’s a common mistake.”

Um, I quoted you, using the term “liberal”. So I guess it is a common mistake? LOL. Even assuming arguendo that you meant progressive, you are still unfairly projecting on social conservatives. Seriously, you must not know many social conservatives if you think that they are monolithically opposed to public nursing.